100 years ago today: 6 February 1918 – British women over 30 get the vote

Additional material added to this post in April 2018

WOMEN GET THE RIGHT TO VOTE

On 6 February 1918 the British parliament enacted The Representation of People Act 1918 which gave men over the age of 21 the vote (19 or over if in the armed services) but more significantly gave British women the vote for the first time – with some important restrictions. As so many men had been killed during the Great War, which in February 1918 still had nine months to run, it was seen as politically unacceptable to give women equal suffrage to men (i.e. over 21 and regardless of any other criteria such as being a property owner). Parliament couldn’t decide on what to do so passed the responsibility to a committee which decided that two criteria would need to be met for women to vote. Firstly the woman would have to be 30 or over and secondly they would have to occupy their own property to the value of at least £5 or be married to a man who did. This property qualification had also applied to men before 1918. The removal of the property qualification for men and the granting of suffrage to women over 30 increased the electorate to 21 million – 8.4 million were women. It is thought about 22% of women over 30 were excluded under the property rule.

Giving women the vote was partly in response to the work that women had done during the war, often working in jobs that men now fighting would have done and contributing massively to the well-being of a war-torn society. However, the suffrage movement at first was largely a middle-class led movement and it was on the whole not the middle class women who were contributing in vital war work – it was the working class women. It was they who were keeping British industry and services operating while the men were away at war. The 1918 Representation of People Act disregarded nearly all working class women who were winning the war on the home front. It was significant that most of these working women were under 30 and, being working class, they would rarely meet the criteria of owning property. Although this injustice was recognised and to a great extent disagreed with even within parliament it would be another ten years before the circumstances were deemed right for equal suffrage for both men and women with no qualifying criteria other than being over 21 to be introduced.

The slow move to universal male suffrage had been building since the 1830s and it was as early as 1832 that the first petition to Parliament was made for votes for women was made when Henry Hunt made an unsuccessful petition on 3 August that year. In 1867, just as male suffrage was being extended again, John Stuart Mill (pictured) called for women to be given the same voting rights as men. It should be remembered that many men supported women’s suffrage, especially radical figures such as Mill. This, however, was not successful and was certainly not a widespread belief. At this time women’s place was largely seen as being in the home and raising children. There weren’t any women represented in Parliament at this time (a women could only stand for Parliament after 1918) and women were excluded from vast sectors of life, especially in terms of work and educational opportunities. Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill’s proposal achieved 73 votes in favour, with 194 rejecting it.

Mill’s stance was a failure but it perhaps invigorated the campaign and most years from 1870 onwards would see similar votes coming before Parliament. Their continuing failure to make a difference prompted many to believe that a more radical direction needed to be taken. In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst helped create a group called the Women’s Social and Political Union, becoming what became known as the suffragettes. The group organised protests and demonstrations, often becoming violent. They would smash windows and property, set fire to postboxes belonging to politicians, chain themselves to railings and most significantly of all refuse to eat when they were imprisoned.

While most women perhaps shared the suffragettes goals of suffrage for women, many were opposed to their tactics. They preferred to take more sedate routes of protest, such as holding meetings, parades and writing letters and signing petitions – the constitutional route if you like. Six years before Emmeline Pankhurst’s group emerged, a group called the Women’s Suffrage Society was formed (1897). They were dedicated to the same goal as the Women’s Social and Political Union would later be but believed in non-violent means of protest. Emmeline Pankhurst had originally been a member of the Women’s Suffrage Society, which became known as the suffragists. They were led by Millicent Fawcett. For more on the differences between the suffragettes and suffragists, read HERE.

Photos: Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929)

The turning point after years of often bitter protests and campaigning and after some shameful treatment of women who protested (including arrest, imprisonment and force feeding) for the vote came in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. During the war there was no elections and this inevitably put back any chance of a vote on electoral reform for the duration. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity for women to demonstrate their worth to the country and demonstrate their justification for being given the vote. Emmeline Pankhurst suspended her campaign during the war, focusing on contributing to the war effort. She believed that for women to get the vote there needed to be a country left in which to vote. This generated a lot of respect for her and for the movement in general.

The increasing role of women in the war effort didn’t go unnoticed and the government promised to give women the vote once the war was over. This was honoured before the war was over with the 1918 Act passing nine months before the war ended. The first opportunity for women to actually vote came at the General Election in December 1918 just a month after the end of the war. It was also at this General Election that the first women was elected as a Member for Parliament, Constance Markievicz (below). A separate Act of Parliament in 1918 had given women the right to stand for Parliament for the first time. Constance Markievicz was a Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil politician and had been active in the Easter Rising in 1916 in Ireland, for which she was sentenced to death. Her sentence was later reduced on the grounds of her gender. Although the first women to be elected to the UK Parliament, as a member of Sinn Féin she, like other Sinn Féin politicians elected, refused to take their seats in Westminster as a protest of British occupation of Ireland. Constance would also become the second women in the world to become a member of a government cabinet in the 1919-22 Irish Republic government, as Minister for Labour.

The first woman to be elected and sit in the House of Commons was Nancy Astor (later Viscountess Astor, pictured). She was an American citizen who had moved to England in 1905 and married Waldorf Astor. She was elected to Parliament on 29 November 1919 representing the Plymouth constituency, taking her seat on 1 December under the title Unionist, which is just another name for Conservative. When her husband succeeded to the peerage she moved to the House of Lords but remained in Parliament until 1945, representing the Conservative party. Ironically, Constance Markiewicz, when she was in Holloway Prison for her Sinn Féin activities had described Nancy Astor as being “of the upper classes, out of touch,” which was probably quite accurate.

Nancy Astor demonstrated a lack of knowledge of political matters and her vocal teetotalism and anti-Catholicism, and the fact that she was American and upper-class didn’t ingratiate her with many beyond the echelons of her class. She tended to say odd or outlandish things, which only alienated her further. However, people were attracted to her wit and her famous ability to deal with hecklers. Her wealth and ability to improvise also proved her well and she used her earlier work with Canadian soldiers and her charity work to her advantage.

In Parliament she avoided the bars and smoking rooms frequented by the men. She was noted for her opposition to divorce reform and this was used against her in Parliament, with it being argued that the reforms she opposed would give British women the right to divorce that she herself had availed herself of in America when she divorced her first husband. She was also in favour of maintaining restrictions imposed during wartime on the sale of alcohol – some of which still exist today with the British licencing laws. Nancy Astor befriend other early women MPs but later become alienated from those from the Labour Party when she opposed the creation of a women’s party in Parliament. She never reached the status of a Cabinet member although she served under four different Conservative MPs. Her most significant legacy was the raising of the legal drinking age to 18 from 14 unless the minor has parental permission. The Bill became known as “Lady Astor’s Bill”.

Outside Government she campaigned for social issues, most notably for the expansion of nursery schools for children’s education. She worked to recruit women into the civil service and police force and campaigned for education reform. Although she was noted for having a streak of cruelty in her, she was also a campaigner against the harsh treatment of juvenile victims of crime. Her work in this area partly led to a Department Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People in 1925. For more on Nancy Astor see HERE.

While 1918 was a milestone in British electoral history, it would be another ten years before the 1928 Equal Franchise Act extended women’s suffrage at last to equal terms with men and made suffrage apply to all men and women over the age of 21 regardless of class or whether they owned property or not. It would not be until 1970 before this age restriction was lowered to 18, where it remains today although in some elections in the UK 16- and 17-year olds can vote and a campaign for this to be the case in all elections across the UK has emerged and failed on more than one occasion in recent years. On a national level, it seems that many politicians, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, are scared of enabling 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in fear that they would exercise their right to vote by voting them out of office. This seems unlikely to be resolved any time soon. At the 2017 General Election, although disputed by some, there was an apparent surge of young voters towards the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. This was a shock to the Conservatives who had expected to win the election comfortably. Instead, they failed to secure an outright majority and had to cobble together a controversial alliance with a far-right Unionist party in Northern Ireland – the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) – in order to remain in power.

On an interesting note in relation to women MPs in the British Parliament. The total number of women MPs elected in the last 100 years has only recently succeeded the number of male MPs in just the current Parliament, demonstrating that there is still a very long way to go a hundred years after the 1918 Act before women have equal representation in Parliament. There are currently 650 MPs at Westminster, 208 are women (32%) and 432 are men (68%). Since 1918 a total of 498 women have been elected to Parliament. They’re are currently 210 women in the unelected upper chamber at Westminster, the House of Lords (26%). The number of women MPs has been increasing steadily since the 1990s when at the 1997 election it was approaching 20% (it had remained under 10% since 1918). The number fell slightly in 2001, but has risen at each of the four elections since, reaching 30% in 2015 and 32% in 2017.

The ratio of female to male Prime Ministers is a little more equal – though still hugely divergent in numbers. Since 1918 the UK has seen 23 premierships, with 18 men holding the office of Prime Minister and only two women – Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and the current PM Theresa May (since June 2016). Of these 18 men, three have held the office on two non-contiguous occasions – Stanley Baldwin (1923-4 & 1924-9 – briefly interrupted in 1924 by James Ramsey MacDonald), James Ramsey MacDonald (1924 & 1929-35) and Winston Churchill (1940-5 & 1951-5). In terms of members of the Cabinet, only 45 women have served as Cabinet ministers since 1918 (below), with the first being the Labour MP Margaret Grace Bondfield who became Minister of Labour in the 1929-31 government of Ramsey MacDonald. In the current Cabinet of Theresa May there are just nine women, excluding the PM herself, who are Cabinet members of have the right to attend Cabinet, out of 28, or just about a third.

Women in the current UK Conservative Cabinet: (SOURCE: gov.uk)

MPs in blue are pictured below on first row, left to right and are full Cabinet members. MPs in red are on second row below, left to right and are allowed to attend Cabinet.

Theresa May – Prime Minister

Amber Rudd – Secretary of State for the Home Department, Minister for Women and Equalities

Esther McVey – Sec. of State for Work and Pensions

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park – Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Privy Seal

Karen Bradley – Sec. of State for Northern Ireland

Penny Mordaunt – Sec. of State for International Development

Elizabeth Truss – Chief Sec. to the Treasury

Andrea Leadsom – Leader of the House of Commons, Lord President of the Council

Claire Perry – Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth

Caroline Noakes – Minister of State for Immigration

SOME BIZARRE REASONS MEN OPPOSED WOMEN GETTING THE VOTE

Sir James Grant, MP for Whitehaven – “Men have the vote and the power at the present moment; I say for Heaven’s sake let us keep it. We are controlled and worried enough by women at the present time, and I have heard no reason why we should alter the present state of affairs.”

Rowland Hunt, MP for Ludlow – “There are obvious disadvantages about having women in Parliament. I do not know what is going to be done about their hats. How is a poor little man to get on with a couple of women wearing enormous hats in front of him?”

Frederick Banbury, MP for City of London – “Women are likely to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment. Their emotional temperament makes them so liable to it. But those are not the people best fitted in this practical world either to sit in this House… or to be entrusted with the immense power which this bill gives them.”

Sir Charles Hobhouse, MP for Bristol East and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – “You have at the present moment certain statistics which show that both the birth and marriage rate are decreasing. Can you adopt at this time a policy which might mean an immense destruction of the population of the country which it is essential should not only be retained, but increased.”

Sir Charles Henry, MP for Wellington – “One of the greatest features in connection with this country is the responsibility of men towards women, and I would view with the greatest apprehension any step which would tend to relieve men of that responsibility.”

Sir John Rees, MP for Nottingham East – “Women are tremendously accessible, extraordinarily impressionable, noted for the adoption of any new thing, and for the easy acceptance of other people’s views. Are those qualities which fit women to rule over the home and foreign affairs of a mighty empire?”

Godfrey Collins, MP for Greenock – “Intuition is far more largely developed in women than in men, but instinct and intuition, although good guides, are not the best masters so far as Parliament is concerned. Parliament exists for the very purpose of opposing feelings, fancies, and inclinations by reason.”

John Henderson, MP for Aberdeenshire Western – “I have read their writings, and in one paper… a moderate publication, I saw that the Prime Minister was violently described as an old fossil. What can you say of people who exhibit such a want of judgment, and such a lack of perception of actual facts?”

Arthur Beck, MP for Saffron Walden – “I daresay that the idealism of the feminine mind and its deadly logic which we have all experienced in private life are qualities superior to those of men, but I do say that in governing a great country and in considering the problems which we have to consider every day in this House such qualities are not valuable, but destructive.”

John Henderson, MP for Aberdeenshire Western – “This is a commercial and industrial country. But it could hardly be hoped that women could govern and manage our commerce and industry. If we were to have women in this House they would be legislating for these commercial industries of the management of which they know nothing.”